Now that I have invited all our friends and family here to find out how we ended up on a journey to Poland for our fifth child, I need to actually post it!
The Decision
It all started last year when we began to have that tell-tale feeling that we needed another child. It's happen four times before and I recognize it well. Iain and Learned started making comments like, "We need a million more kids in this house!" and "When are we going to get some more babies?" Of course, there's that warm glowy feeling when you see a baby while your out or at church which slowly grows to an insistent thudding and shaking of your whole being: Must.have.child.now.
We thought about it for a while. Are we crazy? Can we handle it? Can the kids handle another sibling? We asked the kids. They must be made for us because all of them had the same immediate answer to whether they thought we should adopt again, "Yes! When do we pick them up?" "Them?" we asked. They all said we needed two more. The boys wanted two boys and Millie was insistent that we "get" a boy AND a girl.
Finally in September/October we decided to start the process again with Oklahoma Department of Human Services. We don't believe it is good for the other kids in the house to adopt outside birth order so we knew we would be waiting a while through DHS for a child younger than Padraig (birth date 9/12/2009) but that was OK.
We knew since I am enrolled in the ASL Interpreter Program at OSU-OKC that we were definitely open to deaf/hard of hearing children so I joined a listserv for perspective and current adoptive parents of deaf/hard of hearing kids. We also knew from our experience with Iain's medical issues for the first two years of his life that we were open to a lot of medical issues. And we really wanted to only be considered for those kids because we know there aren't that many parents out there who understand it's really not that hard to deal with "special needs" when it's your child--it's just normal. And because we think some parents don't realize that while a lot of issues seem insurmountable or daunting often turn out to be pretty manageable or totally correctable--even turn out to have no impact a child's ability to have a normal life.
First Contact
Anyway, we went through the home study process with DHS. We love our social worker who placed Iain with us but she was promoted a long time ago so we had a new worker. However, the same worker did our homestudy who did the home study for Iain and Millie.
In the middle of this process, my Deaf/hard-of-hearing listserv received the following email with the subject line of 10-month old baby boy awaiting adoption:
We are advocating for placement of a spunky and developmentally on track little boy in Poland who was born with Microtia, no right eye and a cleft palate. I am happy to discuss details with any interested family. Poland prefers married couples but will place children with single mothers depending on circumstance. He has had excellent care! Please email [our agency] for information.
I saw the email and had a warm feeling. I asked Matt if I should inquire for more information. He said, "It never hurts to ask." Well, please. I'm sure you all know as well as I did at the time how that would go.
The agency told us they were wrong, he was eight months old and sent pics and info. I researched his medical conditions which, based on the photographs, were obviously more involved than the email stated. I reached out to support groups and contacted craniofacial teams for their opinions. And we started looking into costs, international home study and the overall process. We decided we needed to wait until the end of the year to make sure we would be able to afford the adoption in addition to his out of pocket medical care.
Ultimately we decided to pursue Luka's adoption and contacted Deaconess Pregnancy & Adoption Services (the agency we adopted Millie through) to conduct the Hague compliant home study.
A Real Surprise
Deaconess was amazing. Once they heard that Luka was in an institution, they immediately started our home study and had it done in under 3 weeks. They understood how damaging one day, one month can be on a child living in an institution and they did not want Luka to spend one day more in there than he had to. But they had a surprise for us, too.
After conducting our interviews, the worker came to our house for the in-home family interview. At that point she told us that Deaconess would like to present our profile to a birth family that was due in three weeks! They said that there had been pre-natal exposure to prescribed medication and they had had only one family to present and the birth family wanted to see another. They were comfortable with us adopting Luka if we were selected because they knew we did great with two other sets of very close in age kids.
We thought, wow! It's happening AGAIN! We're going to have two more at the same time and 6 total! We were terrified and over the moon at the same time. We've always said if someone wanted to hand us a baby we couldn't say no. We agreed on the condition that if our agency told us it would interfere with adopting Luka we could not do it.
So of course, I was in love with two babies but also worried about how we would handle a newborn and a trip to Poland. But the birth family ended up choosing the other family. They wanted to bless that couple with their first child. We were disappointed but we were always focused on bring Luka home.
Homestudy Done and Dossier
So our home study is done and we have gathered 18 documents most of which were notarized by the amazing, super paralegal Melissa Keplinger. Now Melissa's notary has to be certified on each of those documents by the Secretary of State with an Apostille. A $10 gold seal for each of them!
Once we get our approval from USCIS, our agency can send our dossier to Poland. And then we wait. But it's worth it and it is reassuring to learn about more and more people in Poland who love Luka and are giving him the best care they can.
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